Monday, July 08, 2013

Fred Friend on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

This is the third Q&A in a series
exploring the current state of Open Access (OA). This time the
questions are answered by Fred
Friend.

By profession a librarian, Friend has long
been an energetic and committed advocate for Open Access. He is also one of the
small group of people who attended the 2001 meeting that led to the Budapest
Open Access Initiative (BOAI). It was at
that meeting that the term Open Access was coined, and a definition of OA
agreed.

Friend has also worked for the UK organisation
JISC, and has recently undertaken
consultancy work for the European Commission and for Knowledge Exchange.

Q: What in your view have been the major
achievements of the OA movement since you helped draft the definition of OA in
Budapest in 2001?

A: I am continually amazed by the fact that the concept of open
access to publicly-funded research outputs, as we drafted in the Initiative, is
now on the agenda of governments and funding agencies across the world.

We
proved to be the “butterfly effect” that has led to the winds of change blowing
through scholarly communication, not because we planned it that way but because
what we proposed in the BOAI chimed with the until then unexpressed hopes of
hundreds of thousands of researchers to use the Internet in ways which benefit
human society.

The BOAI was only the catalyst for change. The
real achievements of the OA movement lie in the way the ball we threw in 2002
has been picked up by others who have made freely available the huge volume of
content now in open access repositories, despite considerable pressure to do
nothing about open access. The story of BOAI can be a source of encouragement
to any who feel depressed by the power of vested interests to block changes
needed to release the power of human endeavour.

Q: What have been the main disappointments?

A: I really should not be disappointed, because the take-up of open
access has been remarkable in such a short time-period, but for those of us who
can see the opportunities ahead, the day on which there is payment-free access
to and re-use of 100% of publicly-funded research outputs cannot come soon
enough. That achievement is now not in the hands of those of us who drafted
BOAI but lies with the thousands of researchers across the world who could so easily
bring the day closer by simply depositing their work in an open access
repository.

I understand the pressures many researchers
face to follow the old path to academic recognition. My trust is in the growing
awareness of the foolishness in chasing after recognition through three-decimal-point
journal impact factors which tell us nothing about the quality of an individual
journal article.

Open access opens up new ways of assessing the
value of research publications on a single-article basis. It is in shaking up
many aspects of research communication as much as in opening up access that the
OA movement has been valuable.

Q: There has always been a great deal of discussion (and disagreement) about Green and Gold OA. In light of
recent developments (e.g. the OSTP
Memorandum, the RCUK
OA Policy, and the European Research Council Guidelines
on OA) what would you say are the respective roles that Green and Gold OA should
be playing today?

A: The view of myself and many other OA supporters has remained consistent,
i.e. that both green and gold routes to OA are valid and therefore both should
continue to be recognised in a level playing-field in scholarly communication. Deposit
by authors in an open access repository is the easiest first step but that will
not prevent publication in an OA journal. Most governments and funding agencies
have also continued to follow that even-handed policy, the only exception being
the UK Government, which chose to bow to persistent lobbying by the publishing
industry, set up a Finch Group dominated by publishing interests — both societies
and commercial publishers — and chose to give preference to APC-paid gold OA.

This rushed and expensive decision will not
assist the publishing industry in the long-term, because it has focused
attention on the value for taxpayer money from the various research
dissemination models. How long can the subscription/licensing model continue
when it is the least cost-effective model? How long can APC-paid gold OA
continue with payments at such at a high level when there are more
cost-effective university-managed gold OA journals requiring no or very low
payments from authors? How long can publishers continue to dismiss green OA as
“unsustainable” when their own businesses are at greater commercial risk than
the university repositories providing green OA?

No open access advocate I know wishes to see
the fall of a publishing house, but sooner rather than later the research
funders and taxpayers maintaining the current publishing infrastructure will
realise that the public funding underpinning the present research journals can
be better spent. There is certainly hope for the publishing industry in the new
publishers who have embraced OA completely, instead of trying to fit OA
journals into a subscription-based infrastructure, provided that they do not
mimic the practices of established publishers.

A: The concept of hybrid subscription/APC-paid gold OA journals
looked attractive when they first appeared but the model has not been
implemented widely. Even ignoring suspicions of “double-dipping”, the model has
suffered from the flaws in both the subscription and APC-paid models. Rather
than overcoming the flaws in the subscription model, hybrid journals have added
to those flaws the flaws in the APC-paid model.

In principle hybrid journals could have
assisted in a transition to an individual-article publishing model, but the
continuing publisher accounting model by journal title rather than by
individual article has rendered hybrid journals ineffective as a mechanism for
change. Journal titles are a convenient way of grouping related articles but
are not a good basis for cost-effective business models.

Q: How would you characterise the current state of OA, both in the UK and
internationally?

A: OA remains in a healthy state both in the UK and internationally,
in that the volume of OA content continues to grow.

Perhaps the part of the world with the most
promising OA infrastructure is the European Union, where the repository-based OpenAIREplus
programme for research publications and data is transforming access and re-use
of publicly-funded research outputs. The research programmes in all EU Member
States will benefit from this new infrastructure as the Horizon2020 EU
funding kicks in.

European leaders understand the potential
benefits to innovation and economic growth from this investment in
OA-communicated research. The UK Government also understands the potential
benefits and its commitment to open-ness in research data is strong, even if
its policy on research publications has taken the wrong path.

Q: What still needs to be done, and by whom?

A: So much needs to be done to achieve 100% OA coverage of world-wide
research publications and data that no OA advocate can be complacent.

The OA movement represents a radical shift in
the culture, policies and behaviour of researchers, institutions, funding
agencies and governments. That shift is part-way along its spectrum and the
momentum is, I believe, unstoppable. The number of OA publications continues to
grow along a steady path, so the trend is clear. The available technology
continues to open up new research opportunities which suit an OA environment.

However, such a massive change in research
culture will take several more years to work through, and many individuals and
organisations can contribute to the process of change.

Q: What in your view is the single most important task that the OA movement
should focus on today?

A: Open access repositories are the most cost-effective and
sustainable route to open access, but they have to be shown to be so. We have
to prove to authors that depositing their work in an open access repository is
the best step they can take, not only for their own research and careers, but
for the entire world.

Countering the lobbying against open access
repositories from vested interests should be undertaken through rigorous
research into the costs and benefits of the various publishing models. Open
Access advocates have nothing to fear from such research.

Q: What does OA have to offer the developing world?

The developing world was very much in our
minds when we met to draft the BOAI, and the beauty of the BOAI text — not
drafted by me! — never ceases to inspire me. It is still important to “share
the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich”, working to
“lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation
and quest for knowledge”.

Q: What are your expectations for OA in 2013?

A: Obviously more growth in OA content and commitment, but perhaps
even more important are the stories we are beginning to hear of the value of
sharing research and teaching resources freely across the world.

Open access is good in itself, but the real
benefit from the ability of researchers, teachers and learners to share content
without financial, legal or technical barriers lies in the intellectual,
economic and social growth which results from that sharing.

Q: Will OA in your view be any less expensive than subscription publishing? If
so, why/how? Does cost matter anyway?

A: Cost does matter, but not on its own. Cost always has to be related
to benefit.

I do believe that repository-based OA and
non-APC gold OA will be less expensive than both APC-paid gold OA and the
current subscription/licensing model for research publications, but the
important point is that the cost-benefit from publisher-led models will be
poorer than the cost-benefit from the academic-led models. The reasons are the
high overheads and high profit levels in the current publishing infrastructure,
and equally important the ability of the research and teaching communities to
grow the benefits from internet-based technology.

———

Fred Friend studied
history at Kings College London, obtained a postgraduate library qualification
at University College London, and then began his library career in Manchester
University Library.

After Manchester Friend
moved to the University of Leeds and then to the University of Nottingham
before obtaining his first library director post at the University of Essex.

This was followed by a
move to University College London, where he was library director for 15 years before
starting a new role as Honorary Director Scholarly Communication, leading to
involvement in the international open access movement.

Friend is one of the
authors of the Budapest Open Access Initiative and he worked for JISC for
several years as their Scholarly Communication Consultant. More recently Fred
has undertaken consultancy work for the European Commission and for Knowledge
Exchange. His website can be access here.

3 comments:

Great to read this interview -- the series is shaping up to be fascinating and informative. Just one comment at this point:

"No open access advocate I know wishes to see the fall of a publishing house."

*waves hand*

Actual publishers, I am all for. The businesses that we call "publishers" but whose business is to prevent dissemination are damage. They have absolutely no role to play in a same system, and I will shed no tears if one or more of them go under.

Barrier-based publishers are a tax on research.

(And, not to speak for others, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if Mike Eisen, Bjorn Brembs and Peter Murray-Rust would say similar things.)

OK, Mike. Fair comment. Perhaps I am going soft in my old age, but for the sake of all the young people who work for the publishing giants, I wish we could find and they would accept a smooth transition away from the way the owners of the publishing houses currently run their businesses.Fred Friend

That is a kind and admirable attitude, Fred. My problem here is that, whatever high goals they went into this with, these idealistic young people working for the publishing giants are functioning as enablers of a regressive and oppressive regime. They're not so different from the idealistic young executives who went to work for tobacco giants hoping to change them from within, only to become part of the problem.

Truly, though, if any of the legacy publishers really could make a wholehearted transition, I would welcome it -- and welcome them. (In fact I wrote a series of posts about this possibility last year, entitled "How Elsevier can save itself", but progress since then has not been promising.)